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(touching for PR, ready; this looks like content that was mainly in F9? I presume the idea is that it is still relevant; seems to comply with what I read in other pages. Preview will shake it out. :))
(No difference)

Revision as of 04:14, 23 January 2009

KDE 3 Development Platform / Libraries

Fedora now features KDE 4, and no longer offers KDE 3 as a full desktop environment. Fedora does provide the following KDE 3.5 library packages to run and build the many existing KDE 3 applications:

  • qt3, qt3-devel (and other qt3-* packages): Qt 3.3.8b
  • kdelibs3, kdelibs3-devel: KDE 3 libraries
  • kdebase3, kdebase3-pim-ioslaves, kdebase3-devel: KDE 3 core files required by some applications

Moreover, the KDE 4 kdebase-runtime package, which provides khelpcenter, also sets up khelpcenter as a service for KDE 3 applications, so help in KDE 3 applications works. The KDE 3 version of khelpcenter is no longer provided, and the KDE 4 version is used instead.

These packages are designed to:

  • comply with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), and
  • be completely safe to install in parallel with KDE 4, including the -devel packages.

In order to achieve this goal, Fedora KDE SIG members have made two changes to the KDE 4 kdelibs-devel packages:

  • The library symlinks are installed to /usr/lib/kde4/devel or /usr/lib64/kde4/devel depending on system architecture.
  • The kconfig_compiler and makekdewidgets tools have been renamed kconfig_compiler4 and makekdewidgets4, respectively.

These changes should be completely transparent to the vast majority of KDE 4 applications that use cmake to build, since FindKDE4Internal.cmake has been patched to match these changes. The KDE SIG made these changes to the KDE 4 kdelibs-devel rather than to kdelibs3-devel because KDE 4 stores these locations in a central place, whereas KDE 3 applications usually contain hardcoded copies of the library search paths and executable names.

Note that kdebase3 does not include the following:

  • A complete KDE 3 desktop (workspace) which could be used instead of KDE 4; in particular, KDE 3 versions of KWin, KDesktop, Kicker, KSplash and KControl are not included.
  • The KDE 3 versions of kdebase applications such as Konqueror and KWrite, which are redundant with the KDE 4 versions and would conflict with them.
  • The libkdecorations library required for KWin 3 window decorations, as those window decorations cannot be used in the KDE 4 version of KWin.
  • The libkickermain library required by some Kicker applets, as there is no Kicker in Fedora 10 and thus Kicker applets cannot be used.
Developing new software against the legacy API is discouraged.
As with any backwards-compatibility library, you would be developing against a deprecated interface.
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